Person or computer: could you pass the Turing Test?

In it, he proposed a test in which a human “converses” with two entities — one human and one computer program — over a text-only channel (such as a computer keyboard and display), and then attempts to determine which is the human and which is the computer.

If after, say, five minutes of testing, the majority of human interrogators are unable to determine which is which, Turing said that we could claim the computer system has achieved a certain level of intelligence.

Two recent advances have dramatically enhanced interest: the ready availability of many terabytes of data, from technical documents on every conceivable topic to the growing personal databases of “lifeloggers”; and sophisticated statistical (computational and mathematical) techniques for organizing and classifying this data.

So far no computer system has passed the Turing test, according to the strict rules of the Loebner Prize competition, but they are getting close. The 2010 and 2011 competitions were won by a chat-bot computer system known as “CHAT-L,” by artificial-intelligence programmer Bruce Wilcox. In 2010 this program actually fooled one of the four human judges into thinking it was human.

All this raises the question of whether a computer system that finally passes the Turing test is really “conscious” or “human” in any sense.

These issues were summarized by the University of Bourgogne’s Robert M. French in a recent Science article: “All of this brings us squarely back to the question first posed by Turing at the dawn of the computer age, one that has generated a flood of philosophical and scientific commentary ever since.

“No-one would argue that computer-simulated chess playing, regardless of how it is achieved, is not chess playing. Is there something fundamentally different about computer-simulated intelligence?”

French is among the more pessimistic observers. Others, such as the American futurist Ray Kurzweil are much more expansive.

He predicts that in roughly the year 2045, machine intelligence will match then transcend human intelligence, resulting in a dizzying advance of technology that we can only dimly foresee at the present time — a vision outlined in his book The Singularity Is Near.

Only time will tell when Turing’s vision will be achieved. But civilization will never be the same once it is.

Comments (6)

Creativity is something that we still do not fully have a grasp on, but as we progress to understand more about our brain, being creative might be less of a mythical thing than we think it is and there might be no reason why it can not be replicated in a machine

Turing’s notions were all very well when he first developed them, but until the engineers among us manage to create a machine that can paint a great painting, write a symphony, jam with a jazz band like Coleman Hawkins, write even a mediocre novel or poem, it will continue to be rather easy to distinguish the output of even the most “brilliant” computers from what rather ordinary humans are capable of creating. It seems at least possible that the Turing Test appeals mostly to humans who are themselves somewhat deficient in the creative fields of human endeavor that actually do distinguish the difference between man and machine. That most of the subscribers to this newsletter probably won’t agree that art is more important than science (including medicine) because only art reveals the soul of man perhaps indicates only that the subscribers attach little value to truly human — and humane — values. When a brilliant computer can write a poem as well Yeats, or a play as well as Shakespeare, or a sonata as well as Bach, or paint as well as Rembrandt, perhaps we’ll want to revisit the Turing Test. But until then, really — perhaps the Turing Test is really just a parlor game that fascinates a certain type of dullard. And for people whose faculties can be located on the low-emotion part of the gray scale slope towards Asperger’s and autism.

The Turing Test is no longer about fooling ordinary people but fooling computer scientists and psychologists. Also, a computer may never pass the test, simply because when it could do so it would appear too smart and articulate to be Human.

For most people this sounds like a crazy idea, even though Dresden is a hightech hotspot general public has not yet become aware of what technology truly can fulfill ;-) Time to make the change towards #abundance happen, #HTxA #GSP12 (two hashtags on Twitter and Google+) are the hidden enabling tools.